Essay Introduction on Foster Care
Almost everyone has moved at some point in their life. Whether it is just between houses, to a different part of town, or across the country, I think that we can all agree that it’s a hassle, but even though we hate it, it’s usually the best thing for our families. The concept of being taken away from our homes and families is foreign to some of us; we do not realize the hardships that come with it. Even though we’ve moved houses, most of us have always had a place to call home and a family to fill it. However, that isn’t the reality for many kids in the United States Foster Care System.
These children are put into homes that aren’t theirs with families they don’t recognize. Currently, there are 438,000 children in the system. Even though there are so many children in Foster Care, the system and the children are largely hidden. So first, let’s unpack the boxes and determine what the foster care system is. Then, let’s sort out our belongings to explore the different facets of the system. Finally, let’s put our possessions away and discover the hidden impacts of the system. So, what is foster care? According to childwelfare.gov, foster care is a “temporary service provided by States for children who cannot live with their families.”
Research Paper on Foster Care
In other words, foster care is when a child is temporarily taken care of by an adult that they’re not related to. The system itself is when the government or a social service agency coordinates the placement of these children. But why are children put into this system? According to the American Society for the Positive Care of Children, the number one reason that foster children are put into the system is because the child is unsafe, abused, or neglected in their homes. The Child Welfare system usually (Quoted Words: 13) becomes aware of these issues through reports. Social Workers are sent to investigate these allegations and decide if action needs to be taken. If a social worker decides a home is an unsafe environment for a child, the agency must go to court and get a judge’s approval to have a child put into temporary custody. From there, a child will be placed into foster care.
Argumentative Essay Examples on Foster Care
There are different types of foster care that a child can be placed into. These types include foster family homes, group homes, child care institutions, and pre-adoptive homes. Children spend different amounts of time in foster care. According to ed100.org, 28% of foster children are in care for less than one year, 29% are in foster care between 1 and 2 years, and 48% are in foster care for more than 3 years. From a quick perspective, the foster care system would be a good solution for children with bad home lives. However, despite the fact that the system was established with good intentions, it has continually shown to have many issues and problems associated with it. Now that we’ve unpacked our boxes and determined what the foster care system is, we can sort out our belongings and explore some of the different facets of the system.
Thesis Statement for Foster Care
The experiences of foster care children are unfamiliar to most people; the frequent change in placement, the education instability, and the lack of support when they age out of the system. According to AmericanSpcc.org, frequently moving “causes a unique set of emotional, social, and academic challenges for [foster children]. They often experience grief, guilt, anger, sadness, loneliness, anxiety, low self-esteem, mental and physical health issues”. An article titled “The Hidden Harms of the Foster Care System” by Lenette Azzi-Lessing explains that children in the system never have true stability. She talks about how a child will experience multiple placement changes over their time in foster care. She states that “40 percent of children placed in foster care (Quoted Words: 37) are moved to a different foster home or care facility… at least once during their first six months in state custody”. On average, a foster child will have at least three different placements, and the average amount of time spent in these homes is less than two years.
Ideas: Aging Out of Foster Care
The article also explains how going through so many moves can impact a child, both mentally and emotionally. One of the biggest effects it can have is education. If children move to many different schools, they are not getting the consistent educational knowledge they need to be successful. Foster children are more likely than other students to change schools during the school year, more likely than the general population of students to be enrolled in the lowest-performing schools, and most likely to drop out. According to The Atlantic, “Children are estimated to lose four to six months of academic progress per move,” which can put foster care children years behind their peers.
Another one of the hidden challenges that foster children face is aging out of the system. While most children want to incrementally work towards living on their own, many foster children are anxious to get out of the system and choose to support themselves at 18 years old. Having just turned 18 myself, I can imagine how hard it would be to try and find a job, find a place to live, figure out a source of transportation, find a way to pay for expensive insurance, and many other challenges they might face, all without a safety net. There are currently 438,000 children in the United States foster care system. In 2018, there were 464,000 people living in Colorado Springs. So, the number of children in foster care is almost as many people living in Colorado Springs. As we’ve seen, the effects on these children are daunting.
Abuse within the Foster Care System
An international child placement agency called Arrow Child and Family Ministries stated that the United States is in a “national foster care crisis,” and the statistics (Quoted Words: 39) agree. According to Arrow’s 2017 Annual Report, about 40% of children in foster care never finish high school, only 3% decide to continue their education after high school, and only 1% graduate from college. 25% of foster care children will be homeless, and 40% end up in prison after leaving the foster care system at 18 years old. Arrow states that “80 percent of the prison population once was in foster care, and that girls in foster care are 600 percent more likely than the general population to become pregnant before the age of 21”. In this report, Arrow explains that the foster care system sets children up for failure. For example, let’s say we have two rooms.
One of these rooms has 10 foster care children, and the other has 10 children from Colorado that aren’t in foster care. Let’s say these kids are in their senior year of high school and are excited about graduation. According to the “Denver Business Journal,” the high school graduation rate in Colorado is 79%. So, about 8 of our 10 Colorado students will graduate. However, only 4 of the 10 children in foster care will. Now let’s look at what these children will look like as adults. Only 5% of Colorado citizens are either homeless or incarcerated. So, only 1 out of 10 Colorado adults end up incarcerated or homeless.
However, 6 of the 10 foster care children will end up in jail or homeless after they leave the foster care system. Children that come from homes with their families have more help. However, most children in the foster system won’t have consistent support. I said before that children are put into foster care because they are unsafe, neglected, or abused in their homes. However, Susanne Babbel, a psychologist who studies foster care, states that over 28% of foster care children are abused while in the system. She believes this number is much higher. While Babbel was researching the system, a former foster care child told her that (Quoted Words: 34) roughly nine out of ten fellow foster children she crossed paths with claimed that they had been abused by their foster parents.
Babbel explains that foster children often don’t understand the severity of the situations and consider abuse to be normal. In 2010, a former foster care child took his foster parent to court regarding sexual assault charges. The former foster child won $30 million in damages because the foster parent had been allowed to foster multiple kids despite criminal records of abuse, drug use, and drunk driving incidents. According to Babbel, Foster placement agencies receive money for each placement. This can cause children to be put into bad homes because, being short on homes, the agencies are desperate for placements.
A study done in Oregon showed just how many foster children have bad experiences in foster homes. Of the 83 children who participated in the study, 36% reported being neglected, 19% reported being physically abused, and 14% reported being sexually abused while in the system, bringing the total to 69% of the children in the study being abused. The high number of children in foster care makes consistently monitoring children difficult. I’ve been doing forensics for a couple of years now.
Conclusion
Over this time, I’ve had to research many different topics. However, earlier this year, when I was writing my speech, I ran into some issues. I found it very difficult to find different information and sources on the topic of foster care. I was surprised that it was so hard to find good sources that didn’t hide the truth about foster care. Even though there are so many foster care children, there are simply not enough people to do the research. Now that we’ve unpacked our boxes, sorted out our belongings, and put away our possessions, we’ve come to a new conclusion about the foster care system.
We not only determined what the foster care system is, but we also explored the different facets of the system (Quoted Words: 0) and discovered the hidden impacts that the system has. 438,000 children in foster care are experiencing these hidden impacts every single day, and this number is growing. The number of children in foster care has increased steadily over the past decade, meaning more and more children are going to experience these hidden impacts as time goes on.
So the next time you move to your new cozy home, or when you’re simply just sitting at home enjoying time with your family, think about the foster care child who doesn’t see that as their reality. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe once said, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
